Tom Sawyer
I still to this day remember being home sick from school one day and my father bringing me home a paperback copy of Tom Sawyer to help me feel better. That day began a love of Mark Twain which has continued to this day.
Little Women and Where the Red Fern Grows
The summer after my fourth grade year, I read them over and over and over again.
The World According to Garp
This book came out when I was in high school. The school librarian to a chance that I was mature enough to read it. I’m glad she did.
It was my first “adult situation” novel. I had been reading mysteries, detective novels, and low-tech sci-fi. This book was an eye opener.
The first book I ever fell in love with was Bunnicula, and I dont even know who the author is anymore, but I just loved that book. It was so funny to me when I was little.
“To start a fire”, by Jack London. Or Catcher in the Rye.
A bunch of R.L. Stine kiddy horror books. I don’t even remember which ones.
For a book with literary value, Frank Herbert’s Dune was the first book i truly fell in love with, I think. It’s after Dune I really started reading books.
Ozma of Oz.
First book love, the beginning of a lovely, unspooling ribbon of favorite books…
I fell in love with reading from my very “learn-to-read” book, in which a FROG sat on a LOG. I quickly moved on to a Laura Ingalls Wilder obsession. Early on, I was also astonished by The Diamond in the Window. Recently I thought to check it out on Amazon, and was stunned to see how many people cited the difference it had made in their lives. And yes, FisherQueen, I read and loved Half Magic.
I guess when I was very young it would have been the ‘Susan’ series (young girl lives with cousins in London, gets into ‘predicaments’ that she always manages to get out of…sort of Enid Blytonish).
Then my first real love was ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and the affair has lasted to this day!
But then again, my ‘Times’ Atlas of the World holds a special place in my heart too.
For me, it was my brother’s battered copy of The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin that I found one afternoon when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I reread it count less times, lost it and bought another copy just recently.
You mean before national Geographic? The Jerry Todd books in something like third grade. They were a whimsical collection of kid adventures based around a kid and his friends and they were delightful. Big also. They were hardbound in red broad cloth and about 300 + pages each, written sometime in the early 50s and selling now for a fine price at hard to find book auctions.
The Pink Motel.
Or maybe Uncle Shelby’s ABC Book.
Charlottes Web when I was about 7 or 8. But it was the first real book I read. My next true love affair with a book (I read lots) was in high school when I discovered The Lord of the Rings. Unlike the hundreds of other books I read, I kept re-reading it. Four times all told.
I loved The Phantom Tollbooth too. I first read it on an airplane flight at age 8, and have been careful to reread it at least once a year since then. Another one of my childhood favorites was My Side of the Mountain, which I also read regularly for several years, but I eventually found that it really doesn’t have much appeal to adults.
The Lion, the Witch, and the wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Beautiful book, although over the past few years, I’ve taken a very strong liking to Watership Down, Dune (Oh My God I Love This Book), and of course, the Lord of the Rings.
It’s hard to narrow it down, since I was a serious bookworm by the time I was 5 years old.
Prior to the age of 10, my favorites were Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl, Charlotte’s Web, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph series.
When I was 11, I read the book from which I get my Doper handle. It’s the only book I ever kept from that age.
“The Secret Garden”
will always be in my heart
What a wonderful book.
Even to this day I still hope to build my own “secret garden”
Ender’s Game.
Read it at age 12, and oh so identified with the characters.
I still read it all the time.
The Girl With The Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts. This is one of the few children’s novels (barring the Harry Potter series) that I still have and still read.
as a child: Johnny and the Number Line.
It was so good. About a land where the odd and even numbers are at war.
The evens think they are superior to the odds.
…
til it dawns on the odds that if they jump on an even, it becomes odd.
The evens then realize this, give up their stupid superiority complex and live in peace forever.
As an almost adult: Revolution for the Hell Of It.
Excellent.
Today its the only book i own.